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The Documentary Podcast

Rulebreakers: How I disappear

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.32.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Japan, if you want to disappear from your life, you can just pick up the phone and a ‘night moving company’ will turn you into one of the country’s ‘johatsu,’ or literally ‘evaporated people.’ You can cease to exist. Meet the people who choose to disappear and the people who are left behind.

Transcript

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0:00.0

My grandfather worked on the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and it troubles me.

0:07.0

It also troubled some of the scientists who developed it.

0:11.0

Find out more in the bomb, a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service, available now.

0:18.0

Hello, my name is Shirin Neshatz. I'm an Iranian-born visual artist and filmmaker living in New York.

0:25.0

Welcome to Rule Breakers, a five-part series from BBC World Service in collaboration with

0:31.0

Sundance Institute, where we invite filmmakers more used to telling their stories in pictures to tell them in audio.

0:38.0

Being an Iranian artist, I find myself regularly breaking the rules because I come from a country where

0:45.2

censorship is a way of life. In fact any reflection on society that opposes the

0:50.8

authorities view is considered a crime.

0:54.0

My art has been banned in Iran and currently I live in exile and yet any art I make

1:00.2

has to be carefully coded so I can escape being a target for the Iranian government.

1:06.0

Life for rule breakers is uncomfortable.

1:10.0

In this series we'll meet the imprisoned victims of more than 70 years of Danish colonial

1:15.6

policy in Greenland.

1:18.0

A young man accused of hacking the Pentagon and who has lived with the consequences ever since, a Vietnam veteran who spent 50 years

1:27.2

mapping in America you've never heard of, and a Palestinian Shepherd who breaks all the rules.

1:34.0

But now in episode one of rule breakers,

1:37.0

if you live in Japan and you want to disappear without trace,

1:40.0

you need only pick up the phone and ring a moving company. How many of us have

1:45.5

wanted to do that at some point in our lives? Plenty of us I think. Here is

1:51.0

Andreas Hartman with how I disappear.

1:55.0

I'm 42 years old now.

...

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